From 2013, all member states will have a “national and pluriannual cancer plan”. This is the first decision taken by health ministers during their informal meeting in Brussels, on 5 and 6 July. “I am satisfied that the last countries that were not involved in the European partnership for the fight against cancer, which was launched by the Commission, today clearly announced their intention to do so,” said the Belgian Minister of Public Health, Laurette Onkelinx, who chaired the meeting. “All ministers of public health praised the initiative and stressed their willingness to jointly accomplish the stated goals.”

The partnership aims to help countries in the fight against cancer by setting up a framework, which will make it possible to collect and exchange information, capacities and competences in terms of preventing and combating the disease. This step must contribute to avoiding dissipated action or action that is surplus to requirements and reduce cancer occurrence by 15% in Europe. Parallel to this, ministers committed to improving the screening of breast, colorectal and uterine cancer and ensuring greater coherence in terms of research. In this respect, they called on the European Commission to create a framework that would make it possible to reach this objective.

The last day of the meeting (6 July) was devoted to an exchange of views on the renewal of the mandate of the Health Security Committee. “This committee had been created in 2001 to manage a possible terrorist attack. Then, little by little, it was given additional missions, including pandemic management. It is therefore important to examine the relevance of maintaining it and the mandate it should be granted in future,” commented the Belgian EU Presidency.